An attempt in progress to compile the most universal movies of all time, the creamiest of the crop, the most rewarding and eternal.
Sharing your assent or dissent, as well as any pertinent info, will be greatly appreciated and cited. The goal is not to make you admire this list. It's to get more people making this kind of list for themselves.

Now, this is a movie! It's not just good, it's a movie of the century. So depressingly real and gritty it hurts! Kitty Winn's face, voice, interpretations, and mannerisms are otherworldy, full of child-like curiosity, warm love, cunning, and heartbreak. Al Pacino is like a fickle flame, tame at times and lashing out unpredictably at others. The true beauty of the movie is not that it's a beautifully told story about a romantic relationship, or neither that's it's an unflinchingly detailed account of junkie-life, but rather it's so awesome because it walks the line beautifully between both. Early on in the movie, we are clued in to the secret of the couple's love: the physical reality of their lives doesn't matter to them. They could be thieves, prostitutes, sick, living in filth, and heading towards certain destruction, but as long as they are kind to each other, remembering their love for each other, keeping that as their moral center, then they will be together.
A bonus perspective is to witness Winn's character and to debate whether she has grown, stayed the same, or deteriorated. Her genius performance is that subtle, and the story and direction so powerful that it will be interesting to hear how people's perspectives differ on this!

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Directed by Roman Polanski

Written by Roman Polanski and Kenneth Tynan

Produced by Andrew Braunsberg

Music by The Third Ear Band

Cinematography by Gilbert Taylor

Editing by Alastair McIntyre

Production design by Wilfred Shingleton

Art direction by Fred Carter

Set decor by Bryan Graves

Costumes by Anthony Mendleson

Makeup by Tom Smith

Special effects by Ted Samuels

Choreographer by Sally Gilpin

Fight direction by William Hobbs

Starring Jon Finch, Francesca Annis,

Martin Shaw, and Nicholas Selby

Fantastic and traumatizing rendering of the Shakespeare play, balancing all the aspects of sex, magic, and evil into a seamlessly gripping vessel of a movie. Director Polanski achieves this freedom from staginess by focusing on the theme of fear. The witches are gruesome to behold, Macbeth and his lady are frighteningly wicked, and so is the doomed traps they lay for themselves. Much of the dialogue is set as internal thought, so to make the movie more action-based. The sword-play is riveting. Music, cinematography, makeup, and editing all conjoin eerily to tell a tale of a man who wrestles with the rhythm of time, knowing when to act and when to be still, and how to be virtuous. The attention to detail in the feasts, the battles, and general life in a medieval castle are all splendid to behold even if the sum emotion is that akin to the trippiest nightmare.
It's great to see how cinematic Shakespeare can be, and how stage-play adaptations have come since 1964's Becket. Polanski seems to have taken some notes from Pasolini's Edipo Re, and sadly possibly also from his personal tragedy.

Händler der vier Jahreszeiten

Written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cinematography by Dietrich Lohmann

Editing by Thea Eymèsz

Production design by Kurt Raab

Starring Hans Hirschmüller, Irm Hermann,

Hanna Schygulla, Andrea Schober,

Gusti Kreissl, and Ingrid Caven

Very depressing, but somehow also very beautiful. The acting is stilted, but it is purposefully so, allowing us to fill in our emotions during the moments of silence between every line of dialogue. There is an element of searching through the characters' pasts, our memories of earlier scenes, to unravel the mystery of some of the decisions made, and this makes the experience more striking, as if it happened in our past. The short flashback scenes peppered throughout give a refreshingly romantic air to the dreary urban reality.The title translates from Deutsche to "Merchant of Four Seasons".

Il Decameron

Written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Starring Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli,

and Pier Paolo Pasolini

Produced by Alberto Grimaldi

Music by Ennio Morricone

Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli

Editing by Nino Baragli and Tatiana Casini Morigi

Art direction by Dante Ferretti

Set decor by Andrea Fantacci

Costumes by Danilo Donati

It comes off as a celebration of life, and it does this partly through the rebellious and lusty collection of stories, but also partly through the camera's wandering gaze which catches people at play, fighting, chatting, and sometimes catches non-human subjects like an empty but tilled field, and the winding zigzag walls of a ghetto complex. It's a beautiful poem against the morality around sex. Though the tone is always sexy, the undertones shift from comic, to romantic, to blasphemous, to wistfully contemplative.

The title translates from Italian to "The Decameron", which refers to the 14th-century novel it was based on.